Down the Drain | Sagar | The Caravan

The Caravan’s cover story this month is on the Swachh Bharat Mission, and concludes that it is “heading for failure.” The article compellingly points out that addressing manual scavenging is essential for a successful SBM. Sagar writes:

The Swachh Bharat Mission raises questions for which the government does not appear to have adequate answers. Manual scavenging exists in the yawning gap between the amount of excreta produced by India’s enormous population and the country’s existing capacity for processing it sanitarily. If that gap is not closed, especially as the government strives to get more than half a billion people who did not previously use latrines to start using them, it will perpetuate the same old practices.